“I don’t know if I’d call it pain,” Dany said. “There’s no word yet for it. No one has thought of a word yet.”
“I know, man,” Claude said. “It’s a real bitch.”
In spite of his huge muscles and oversized tattoos, Claude seemed oddly defenseless, like a refugee lost at sea, or a child looking for his parents in a supermarket aisle. Or maybe that’s just how Dany wanted to see him, to make him seem more normal, less frightening.
“I hear you killed your father,” Dany said.
The words sounded less severe coming out of his mouth than they did rolling around in his head. Claude pushed both his hands into his pants pockets and looked off into the distance toward the banana groves.
“Can I sit?” he asked, turning his face back toward the mausoleum platform, where Dany was sitting.
“I didn’t mean to say it like that,” Dany said. “It’s not my business.”
“Yes, I killed my old man,” Claude said in the same abrupt tone that he used for everything else. “Everyone here knows that by now. I wish I could say it was an accident. I wish I could say he was a bastard who beat the crap out of me and forced me to defend myself. I wish I could tell you I hated him, never loved him, didn’t give a fuck about him at all. I was fourteen and strung out on shit. He came into my room and took the shit. It wasn’t just my shit. It was shit I was hustling for someone else. I was really fucked up and wanted the shit back. I had a gun I was using to protect myself out on the street. I threatened him with it. He wouldn’t give my shit back, so I shot him.”
There was even less sorrow in Claude’s voice than Dany had expected. Perhaps Claude too had never learned how to grieve or help others grieve. Maybe the death of a parent early in life, either by one’s own hand or by others, eliminated that instinct in a person.
“I’m sorry,” Dany said, feeling that someone should also think of a better word for their particular type of sorrow.
“Sorry?” Claude wiped a shadow of a tear from his face with a quick swipe of the back of his hand. “I’m the luckiest fucker alive. I’ve done something really bad that makes me want to live my life like a fucking angel now. If I hadn’t been a minor, I’d have been locked up for the rest of my life. They might have even given me the chair. And if the prisons in Port had had more room, or if the police down there were worth a damn, I’d be in a small cell with a thousand people right now, not sitting here talking to you.”
Claude threw his hands up in the air and, raising his voice, as if to call out to the stars slowly evaporating from the sky, shouted, “Even with everything I’ve done, with everything that’s happened to me, I’m the luckiest fucker on this goddamned planet. Someone somewhere must be looking out for my ass.”
It would be an hour or so now before Dany’s aunt’s burial at dawn. The moon was already fading, slipping away, on its way to someplace else. The only thing Dany could think to do for his aunt now was to keep Claude speaking, which wouldn’t be so hard, since Claude was already one of them, a member of their tribe. Claude was a palannit, a night talker, one of those who spoke their nightmares out loud to themselves. Except Claude was even luckier than he realized, for he was able to speak his nightmares to himself as well as to others, in the nighttime as well as in the hours past dawn, when the moon had completely vanished from the sky.
THE BRIDAL SEAMSTRESS
Beatrice Saint Fort was lying down for one of her midday siestas when a journalism intern arrived at her new house in Far Rockaway, Queens, to interview her for a short feature on her last day as a bridal seamstress. The intern, a striking Haitian American girl with waist-length, amber-hued dreadlocks and a gold loop in her right nostril, had to knock several times before Beatrice finally made it to the front door in a green flannel nightgown and matching rabbit-shaped slippers. Beatrice held the door half open, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, while barring the entrance with her wispy frame. A petite, wasp-waisted woman, Beatrice had shoulders that curved, and she bent forward as though she’d spent too much time searching for things on the ground.
“My name is Aline Cajuste,” the intern said. “I called yesterday and you told me to come at two?”
“Oh,” Beatrice said, running her long, veined fingers over the rainbow cap that covered her bullet-shaped head.
“May I come in?” Aline asked.
“Sure,” Beatrice said. In spite of her size she had a loud, commanding voice, like someone who was accustomed to giving orders. “Have a seat while I get myself ready.”
A half hour later, a more youthful-looking and made-up Beatrice emerged, wearing a purple tunic dress and a curly bronze wig pinned to her scalp. Putting aside a profile of the actress Gabrielle Fonteneau that she was reading from her own newspaper (“A model of the kind of uplifting articles you should attempt,” her editor in chief, Marjorie Voltaire, had said), Aline looked up from the plastic-covered couch near the window where she’d sat since Beatrice had disappeared and politely asked, “May we begin?”
“Sure,” Beatrice said, “but first let me make you some coffee.”
Before Aline could refuse the coffee, Beatrice vanished behind the louvered door separating the living room from the rest of the house, giving Aline another chance to look around and jot down a few notes.
The living room was bare enough to make setting up the piece an easy task. Aside from some taped boxes piled in a corner, there were only the couch and a glass coffee table. On the wall was a picture of Jesus, neither white nor black, but somewhere in between, and beneath it a headless dressmaker’s model covered with a beaded lace gown.
“Can I help?” Aline called from the living room.
“Don’t move,” Beatrice called back. “I won’t be long!”
By Aline’s watch, it took Beatrice another twenty minutes to make the coffee. When Beatrice finally resurfaced, Aline promised herself she wouldn’t let the woman out of her sight again until they’d completed the interview.
“Okay.” Beatrice sat down on the couch, watching Aline. “Tell me, is this the best coffee you’ve ever had?”
Indeed it was. Aline had an expensive espresso machine at home that she’d not yet gotten to produce anything nearly as delicious as Beatrice’s coffee. The espresso machine was a college graduation gift from her thirty-years-older girlfriend; she’d shipped it to Aline all the way from Miami, where she’d gotten a new chaired position in the psychology department at Florida International. On a late-night call, during finals week, she’d asked Aline what she wanted most after graduation, and still exhausted from back-to-back all-nighters, Aline had mumbled that she wanted (1) to stop drinking watered-down coffee, (2) to eat no more frozen dinners, and (3) to do something with her life.
She’d sent Aline the espresso maker and a three-hundred-dollar gift certificate for a five-star restaurant meal. “The rest,” she’d written on her newly monogrammed stationery card, “you have to figure out yourself.”
Beatrice’s coffee was beginning to relax Aline. Ignoring her editor’s advice (“Don’t get too cozy with the natives,” she’d told Aline soon after she’d offered her the internship), Aline was tasting spirits in the coffee, but couldn’t identify which. Beatrice had brewed the coffee in a way that overpowered whatever she’d added to it, but still left its effects intact.
The tips of Aline’s fingers and toes were tingling, and Beatrice was starting to seem like someone she knew or should have known better, like her college professor girlfriend, who was always looking for new conquests, in both life and career.
“You want to know my secret?” Beatrice asked.
It took Aline a minute to figure out that Beatrice was still talking about the coffee.
“You want to know why it tastes so good?”
“I’m interested,” Aline said.
“The secret is time,” Beatrice said, picking up the cup she’d poured for herself. “I always take my time, whether it’s getting dressed, making coffee, or sewing those wedding gowns.”
As she reached into her bag, pulled out a tape recorder, and put it on the edge of the coffee table between them, Aline thought that if Beatrice took as much time with her work as she did getting dressed and making coffee, her brides would be baptizing their children by the time their gowns were done. However, she simply asked, “Do you mind if I record?”
“First,” Beatrice began as though she were the one conducting the interview, “remind me again what this is for.”
“As I mentioned yesterday,” Aline said, “I write for the
Haitian American Weekly
. You made a wedding dress for our editor in chief, Marjorie Voltaire. Do you remember Marjorie?”
Beatrice raised both her hands to her chin, her penciled eyebrows creased in full concentration as though she were trying to channel Marjorie Voltaire into the room.
“Well, Marjorie was so sad to learn you’re retiring that she asked me to write this story.”
What Marjorie had actually said was, “I hear that the woman who made my wedding dress is giving up the trade. Go talk to her. Maybe we can get a short piece out of it.”
“I don’t remember that girl,” Beatrice said with a sigh of resignation, as though she’d given remembering her best shot and failed, “but I’ve made a lot of dresses for a lot of girls. In any case, it would have been better for you to write this when I was still working. I could have gotten a few more clients and would have stopped sooner.”
Seeing this as an opportunity to officially begin the interview, Aline leaned over and pressed a button on the tape recorder.
“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”
“Old,” Beatrice said.
“Forties?” Aline ventured, even though Beatrice looked much older, late fifties at least.
Beatrice threw her head back and let out an earsplitting laugh, contorting her face in such a way that her skin, had it been cloth, would have taken hours to iron out.
“So you would have liked to retire sooner?” Aline continued.
“Everything happens when it’s meant to happen,” Beatrice said. “That’s what I tell my girls when they think they’re either too early or too late in getting married. By the way, are you married?”
“No,” Aline said.
“Don’t worry,” Beatrice said, taking another sip of her coffee. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you what a great institution it is.”
“Please tell me why you’ve chosen to retire now, after all this time,” Aline said. ”You’ve been making wedding dresses for many years, is that so?”
“I’ve been making these dresses since Haiti.” Beatrice arched her neck and pushed her head toward Aline’s. “In all that time, I’ve sewn every stitch myself. Never had anyone helping me. Never could stand having anyone in my house for too long. Now it’s become too hard. I’m tired.”
Beatrice stated this last part flatly, as though it were simply a fact, not a plea for sympathy or pity, which Aline couldn’t help but admire.
“Describe for me the process of making a wedding dress,” Aline said.
“Well.” Beatrice cleared her throat after a series of dry coughs, as sudden and as consistent as a smoker’s cough or a lint cough. “My girls—when I say my girls, I mean the girls I make the dresses for—they come here carrying photographs of tall, skinny girls in dresses that cost thousands of dollars. They bring those to me and say, ‘Mother’—I make them all call me Mother, it’s more respectful that way— they say, ‘Mother, this is the dress I must have for my wedding.’ It’s part of my job to tell them, without making them cry, that they’re too short, too wide, or too pregnant for a dress like that, even if I lose money. I don’t do this for money. When any of my girls puts on one of my dresses, everyone at that wedding is going to be looking at it. When they’re singing ‘Here comes the bride,’ they’re really singing ‘Here comes the dress.’ And the way I see it, I am that dress. It’s like everyone’s looking at me.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Aline thought. What could she ask next that would get a similarly lengthy response?
“Have you ever been married?”
“You never ask a woman my age a question like that,” Beatrice replied.
“The readers might want to know if you’ve ever made a wedding dress for yourself,” Aline said by way of an apology. “Besides, you asked me—”
“It’s okay to ask younger women,” Beatrice interrupted, “but with a woman like me, you keep that type of question to yourself. I’ve never wanted to be asked that question. That’s why all the girls call me Mother.”
Aline wrote on her reporter’s pad, “Never married.”
Soon, one side of Aline’s cassette was near full. As she turned the tape over, Beatrice suddenly suggested that they take a walk down her block so Aline could see it.
“I don’t need to do that right now,” Aline tried to protest.
But Beatrice was already standing up and walking to her door.
It was a sunny, yet breezy afternoon. There were birds and squirrels skipping on the branches of the tall green ash in front of Beatrice’s house. Aside from the child-care center at the end of the block, all the houses looked the same, with red-brick facades, gabled roofs, bow windows on the first floors and sash ones on the top. There were steps leading up from the street to the doorways and a patch of land up front that some fenced in and made into a garden and others cemented into an open driveway.
As she and Aline strolled up and down the block, Beatrice pointed out the residences of her neighbors, identifying them mostly by their owners’ professions and nationalities. On the left was the home of the Italian baker and his policewoman wife. Across the street was the house of the elderly Guyanaian dentist and his daughter the bank manager. Further down the block was the Dominican social worker, then the Jamaican schoolteacher, and finally the Haitian prison guard.
Beatrice had another coughing spell in front of the prison guard’s house, and when it stopped, her face was somber, her eyes moist.
“Where does he work?” Aline asked, imagining a long commute for Beatrice’s sole Haitian neighbor, from some distant correctional facility in upstate New York.
“I knew him in Haiti,” Beatrice replied. She raised her fingers toward the Roman shades on the front window, accusingly, it seemed to Aline, but then refused to say anything else. Was he an old friend, Aline wondered, a new enemy, a past love?
“Do the two of you talk?” Aline asked. “Are you friends?”
“Friends?” Beatrice made a loud sucking noise with her tongue and teeth. Before walking away, she waved her hands dismissively at the house, as if wanting to make it disappear.
When they returned to Beatrice’s front steps, a few more ash leaves had fallen there. Beatrice reminded herself out loud that she needed to have the higher branches of the green ash trimmed. For she often sat on her stairs in the early evening, she said, completing some details of her work.
Beatrice disappeared into her kitchen as soon as they walked into her house. Aline looked around the living room again, this time for some sign of the mysterious jailer, a photograph, a love or hate letter, some framed memento that she’d missed.
Beatrice returned with the rest of the coffee, still warm from earlier.
“Did you study to do what you’re doing now?” she asked Aline, setting down new clean cups.
“Not really,” Aline said. “I studied French.” Then not sure that Beatrice understood or approved of her college major, she elaborated, “Books, words written by French people over many centuries.”
These last few words seemed to clarify nothing, just as they never did for Aline’s parents, who ran their church’s day-care center in Somerville, Massachusetts, so Aline became quiet. She didn’t want to tell Beatrice that she’d simply taken the newspaper internship because it was the first paid job she was offered after she’d been dumped by her girlfriend, needing important-sounding work to report to both her ex—should they ever speak again—and her folks.
“When you were studying this, what was it, French, did you learn anything useful?” Beatrice asked offhandedly.
Aline’s common sense and her recollection of Marjorie Voltaire’s caveats told her that she was losing control of the interview. However, it had been such a long time since anyone had spoken to her with such interest that she frankly welcomed it.
She was finding it hard now to remember anything from any of the hundreds of books she’d read in school. What instantly came to mind, aside from her former professor, was a film of a depth-perception experiment she’d seen in a Psych 101 class, in which an infant cried when he was made to crawl over a glass surface with an image of a deep gorge below. Much had been made of the fact that the infant had displayed fear of falling into the gorge, despite not knowing what a gorge was or what it meant to fall. Aline had thought the experiment cruel and had been unable to watch most of the class film, though she’d never been able to forget what little she’d seen.
It was after she babbled the story of the gorge experiment to Beatrice and got no response that she noticed the sewing kit on Beatrice’s lap, a cedar box divided into several sections, each filled with thimbles, bodkins, pin-cushions, and chatelaines that looked as though they were from another era. Beatrice was searching for something in the box and let out a sigh of relief when she found it. It was a gold thimble with her name carved in microscopic letters on the base and a wreath of tiny wildflowers on the rim.
Beatrice moved the thimble closer to Aline’s nose ring, then took turns capping each of her ten fingers with it.
“What are you going to do after you retire?” Aline asked, trying to complete the interview.